How Do I Market My Rebrand?

So now that you’ve completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you’ve done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website launches.

Look at the Whole Picture

We mapped out a very strategic rebrand calendar {link to other BLOG} for all the tasks leading up to launch, and as a part of that we also completed a strategic marketing campaign and content calendar for the year following our rebrand. This can be quite a bit of work. You have to look into your business strategy as well as your brand identity. For example, if you reevaluated your core values, your service offerings, or your product offerings as a part of your rebrand, then you have a lot of new information to tell your clients – much more than just showing them a new logo.

The Guts of your Rebrand

So let’s dig into your rebrand. As we looked at our company as a whole, we decided to evaluate our core values, our service offerings, as well as our verticals, or personas. Each of these ended up leading to at least one new campaign over the next year. This gives us time for a specific strategy to tell our customers all about us and helped us to prioritize our messaging.

Some of the questions we asked ourselves, which might help you in this regard are as follows:

Are we happy with our current clients?

What types of clients do we not have that we wish we did?

What clients do we have currently that won’t fit our culture after our rebrand?

What are some clients or industry’s we’ve never gone after before but want to go after?

What are we committed to? What are our values, individually? (as this then builds a brand)

What is our favorite part of our workday?

What is our leave favorite part of our workday?

In which areas do we consider ourselves to be experts?

In which areas do we need significant growth?

What new skills would we like to learn this year?

What skills are most valuable to us right now?

Is our industry growing and changing, or stagnant?

What is the long-term economic disposition of our industry? Of our clients?

This list is merely a sun in a galaxy of stars, and therefore limitless. Some of these questions we got off web searches (as you likely found this article), some came up through business strategy sessions utilizing Scaling Up {ADD LINK}, and others came up in random conversations.

Either way, we took a good hard look at our business from the inside out. Then we began to map out what we wanted to talk to our prospects about over the next year.

Campaign Strategy

Up until now, we have not spent any money on marketing. We didn’t want to waste any money on a non-strategic campaign that was merely temporary and not built to gain the business long-term growth. Throughout the last year of our rebrand process, we have a really good idea of where our business is headed and now feel that we can strategically market ourselves.

What we have found is that this merely looks like sharing our experience with potentially interested parties! We’ve found that the most successful brands at marketing online are really just giving away information. This increases credibility as well expertise in the industry. We have mapped out our campaigns over the next year to mimic this flow by documenting everything we’ve learned over the past year, and spreading the wealth to the masses!

I won’t tell you what every campaign is, I don’t want to give away the farm, plus they are always subject to change as we learn more, but I will explain what we are marketing and why we made those decisions.

We first decided to share our experience with – completing a rebrand! This article is a piece of that campaign! We thought, what better way to dive in and digest everything we just learned and experienced than to write about it. This campaign was launched right around the time of the announcement email about our new name – Bolt Goodly. This campaign consists of two announcement emails (one for current clients, one for everyone else), 4 articles, and two new landing pages, one for digital marketing consultation, and one for rebrand consulting.

In order for all of these items to launch on time, we were working on them for weeks in advance. And to be perfectly honest…I wrote most of them in the final week before launch! This is not ideal, I will tell you now. But realize that you will run into all sorts of problems, blockages, etc. that may delay your calendar. I knew this, had a plan and got behind anyways! So sometimes you just have to roll with the punches =)

That being said, every other campaign for the rest of the year is mapped out so that we are launching a campaign every month, while simultaneously working on another one and adjusting the one we launched in the previous week.

Now you may be asking, what do I launch and when? Well, that’s where the real strategy comes in! Through our series of questions, we asked ourselves, we now know the two most important things to know before you can market anything:

✓ What do I want to say?

✓ Who do I want to say it to?

Depending on your industry, some campaigns, along with the answers to the questions above should be apparent as to what they are and when they launch. For example, anyone in the retail industry should consider their Q4/holiday campaign. This entire quarter can make or break a retail entity. There are many opportunities through Black Friday and other holiday sales to launch sales campaigns, new products, or another special.

We’ve also considered other holidays throughout the year where we might have an offer or a service that applies. Beyond the actual Gregorian calendar, we also look at times of year that are relevant to our vertical markets.

For example, we work with a lot of nonprofits and they tend to have extra money to unload at the end of the fiscal year or a new budget and money to spend at the beginning on the fiscal year. So we will market ourselves and our new brand specifically to nonprofits around the turn of the year.
Campaign Calendar

Once we’ve figured out all of the above sections, we mapped out our campaign calendar for the year, which also included a content audit of our inventory.

We have a campaign launching every month and for the 2 months leading up to it, I’m writing content, mapping it out then launching. I’m writing for one of mapping the other 1 out and launching another campaign.

This rebranding campaign is basically offering people like you a little insight into what this might look like for someone else. Hopefully, I’ve shared some nuggets of wisdom that may help you with your process or you just come across it for maybe an article you’re doing research.

If you want some more information on our campaign strategy, we’d love to brainstorm with you! Drop us a line.

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...

We are rebranding!

The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce…that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a re-brand checklist, and there’s a lot of information out there on the web. We researched and scoured for hours making sure we were ready for this journey ahead.

You can do a simple Google search and find plentiful articles on this process (some of which I will reference) but I really want to reveal what this process has looked like from our small agency perspective. This process will look different for everyone, but here are some of the most common, biggest questions we had to answer:

How do I know I need to rebrand?

What is a brand identity?

When is a good time to start the process?

Where do I start?

How do I come up with a new, unique name?

Should I hire a branding agency?

How do I spread the word?

How do I know I need to rebrand?

Well…it depends! For us, Kirk and a business partner started Venture Catalysts in mid-2016, and in early 2017, the agency was turned over to Kirk and the previous partner became a client. That’s when I came onboard! Our previous partner, and now a client, has remained a close confidant and coach, but this shift in leadership ultimately shifted the direction of Venture Catalysts.

Our previous partner also owns the domain and name Venture Catalysts and wants to keep it for future endeavors, and he graciously gave us until the end of the year to build up our business and re-brand. So in some cases, you may be forced to rebrand!

Shifts in ownership, such as our case, or other situations like new investors, company buy-out, and the like may force a rebrand.

Other situations that may force a rebrand could involve current events, shifts in the industry, economy, or government, or any other force that may render your current brand no longer relevant or effective. A great example of this is Instagram’s rebrand in May of 2016. Instagram shifted from a logo that mirrored a classic film camera, to a sleeker multi-colored logo that reflected the more modern digital camera’s as well as keeping up with how quickly technology is changing.

Another big reason to rebrand is if your organization is quite established (old…) and simply needs an updated identity. One of my favorite stories is Old Spice’s rebranding strategy in 2010. Old Spice is a classic American company since 1938. 75 years is a long time to be in business successfully, but this brand was well-known as being for “older” gentlemen. Old Spice showed how you can update your customer experience with new products (body wash), reaching a new generation (social media campaigns), and quippy commercials (“Smell like a man, man”) and remain relevant.

Old Spice didn’t simply create a new logo. They created a whole new identity, showing that they are still relevant and for every man, not just the older generation, by running a successful new marketing campaign.

And this brings us to…

What is a brand identity?

This article on Investopedia delves into the differences between the brand image and brand identity, stating that:

“…a company’s brand identity is what it says about who it is – the product or service it delivers, the quality it gives customers, its advantages over competing brands. The brand image, on the other hand, is how the brand is perceived by the public.”

So rebranding is a lot more than simply creating a new logo. This is a time to re-evaluate your products and services, your operations, your core values, and where you sit in the world.

For us, this looks like re-affirming our core values of service, transparency, and collaboration. We are doing much more than coming up with a new name and logo. We have spent hours researching other companies branding strategies, various core values, and diving into the type of experience we want to offer our clients.

When is a good time to start the process?

We were fortunate in that our rebrand is timebound. Knowing that we had until the end of 2017, we started implementing a plan in early April. There is no singular good time to start this process. There may a certain time of the fiscal year that will be better depending on your industry (i.e. a retail brand should probably not try to implement a brand during the busy holiday season!), but other than that, the major factors are more obscure and mostly internal.

As referenced in many of the checklists I’ve found, some areas to consider before beginning are:

Buy-in – ensure all important stakeholders, employees, and other important figures in your organization are on board

Identify your name – in order to begin a brand identity kit process (see below) you need a name, first and foremost! If you aren’t changing the name, move to the next step

Stick to the plan – delegate, meet, followup, and launch. Everyone in the organization should be involved in the process and/or be updated throughout to keep everyone accountable to launching on time.

Where do I start?

We started with (multiple) whiteboard sessions. You can do this how you already have brainstorming sessions. Maybe your team meets in a large meeting room, maybe your board starts this process, maybe you send out surveys to your employees – whatever you do, get the ideas flowing! We began with the 5 Ws & How of Venture Catalysts. Once we knew who, what, where, when, why and how we do business, we began to form our identity, and then ideas for names came more easily.

And as always, lots and lots of Googling anything and everything!

How do I come up with a new, unique name?

Our new name ultimately came from one of these sources (nope, not telling yet!), but it took hours and hours of discussion, decision, checking domain names, domain unavailable (or too expensive), start over. It was a long grueling, process, but there has been nothing more satisfying than the moment I had that ever so sought after “aHA!”

Should I hire a branding agency?

Once we settled on a new name, we now had to decide if we were going to attempt the full rebrand on our own or hire an agency. We are a digital marketing agency, so while we use Canva, Photoshop, and other design tools on a daily basis, we are not experts in creating a brand identity. Can we create our own logo? Sure. Should we? Now there’s a different question.

We ultimately decided to contract with a brand identity agency for a cohesive process and brand identity packet. We are experts on data & campaigns and can help our clients with small shifts like updated colors or a variant of their existing logo, but we thought we should leave this entire process to the pros.

Our branding agency isn’t just creating a new logo and selecting colors and fonts. The process starts with an in-depth survey of our business. This covers topics from how we operate internally, who our clients are, what we are best at, who are our competitors, how do we differentiate from them, and my favorite question: “If your company was an animal, what would it be?” The answer was a tardigrade!

With a full understanding of our 5Ws & How, they are helping us create an entire identity, that does include logos, colors, and fonts, of course, but ultimately gives our brand a “feeling’ when you see or hear the name.

“A branding agency will support your brand, by developing an understanding of your business, clarifying your goals and objectives and communicating this in the right way to the right audience. From thisinformationthey will help provide a strategy to grow your brand and provide you with the right toolkit to embed your brand purpose, values, promises, positioning, and identity into your organization.“~ The Branding Journal

So from my personal experience, I would highly recommend hiring a branding agency. While this is an extra cost to work into the budget, the long-term value that it will bring to your organization and clients will make it worth it.

How do I spread the word?

This hearkens back to the extensive calendar planning. We started our rebranding process in April, we are launching in January, and in between, we’ve been working on items every week to keep the process moving forward. A big part of this is a HUGE marketing campaign. We are Silver-Level Certified Partners with SharpSpring so we are using this tool to create multiple email automations that correlate to our rebrand, our services, specials & discounts, and more. On top of that, we have created a content calendar with blogs and articles (this is the first one!) and a social media calendar.

We are also building out landing pages, creating ads, and later in 2018 adding a YouTube with videos. With these planning tools, we have a few that are due each week which allows plenty of time to review, edit, and have them ready for launch in January.

Another easy way to get the word out is to start with who you already know! Let your existing clients and prospects know about your rebrand with a memo, email, and social media posts. We’ll be doing this about a month out, so everyone can get used to seeing our new name in emails, social media, etc.

Wrap Up

As I’ve mentioned, there’s no singular way to go about this process. Lots of research and planning are the best two pieces of advice I can give after having done it!

If you have some questions, or just want to meet up, we’d love to chat with you! Click below to get in contact with us, and when you get frustrated, here’s my daily reminder from a digital-gal:

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn’t that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase – “You’ve got mail!” While email began to be developed in 1978-79, it became a household function in the early 90s.

Email immediately brought a new, faster, better way for people to communicate with one another, and businesses joined in the fray from the start. Email was originally developed to be an electronic version of the way that businesses already communicated with one another. This article in Times magazine interviews the inventor of email (he was only 14) and he goes into detail about how and why he developed it. It’s a really interesting read.

We’ve come a long way since then adding instant messaging, then cell phones and text messaging, and finally today we have the mix of social media, video calling, and the list goes on. While email is still used by most people on a daily basis whether for business or personal communication, my experience is that most people already see it as archaic. As technology advances, we are now quick to adapt to the next best thing.

Even so, email continues to be one of the best, easiest, cheapest ways to communicate, especially for businesses. Email isn’t dead! The way we use it has shifted, that’s for sure. While you may have initially used email to send pictures of the kids to family or emails to your colleagues within your intranet, now we use email for everything. Every time you enter your email on a landing page, newsletter sign up, and the like, you are opting in for that particular service.

Emails are also now more automated than ever. While you may still write emails personally to family and colleagues, most organizations emails are carefully thought out, written in advance, and then sent automatically. This is called email automation.

As a digital marketing agency, email has remained one of our top focuses, and in this past year has become our main focus. We have realized through data analysis and trial and error with our clients that email is one of the quickest and cheapest ways to market to their client base.

We work with SharpSpring as a Silver Level Certified Partner, the only one in the state of Nevada. While sending a quick newsletter or an email blast to your customer list may be easy, a strategic email automation campaign can be a lot more complicated. And we’ve spent the time researching, launching, analyzing, and adjusting our email campaign process to claim the title of experts in this field. We’ve utilized our partner resources through SharpSpring, as well as other expert advice from the industry. We swear by Ryan Deiss’ Invisible Selling Machine and have used that as a basis for our email campaigns while adjusting the process to fit our clients’ needs.

We recently collaborated with SharpSpring to create a case study on one of our more successful email campaigns. Social Media Investors, LLC, a small business in Las Vegas, NV, reached out to us for help in marketing to a large email database of around 20,000, collected over 5 years at networking events, meetings, and the like. Social Media Investors aims to help small businesses with a small marketing budget utilize social media to their advantage through a developed management platform. The question was, how do we get this platform in front of 20,000 people? After multiple strategy meetings with the client, we set out to create the following email automation:

Free trial campaign: 8 emails

Post sign-up, upgrade to ‘pro’ campaign: 8 emails

Upgrade from ‘pro’ to ‘premium’ campaign: 7 emails

This campaign took a few days to write and set up, but the idea was that once launched, it would work quietly in the background promoting his services while he focused on client interaction. We had some great learnings from this campaign, here’s an excerpt from the case study:

Challenge 1: Ensure that all of the leads in the client’s database were solid, qualified leads. SMI had collected many leads over the years, so at this point, many were no longer active. Within its first week, the campaign came close to going over the spam threshold. SMI took a look at which leads were not engaging and removed those from its list, which greatly improved engagement rates for the subsequent emails in the campaign.

Challenge 2: The amount of prep time required to set up a massive campaign such as this one. It’s important to be strategic in the planning phases to ensure the campaign will essentially run itself and that minimal work will be needed after the launch. This involves gathering and setting up the right content in your emails and landing pages, and then formulating each task in the automation to ensure leads are properly captured through landing pages and ending up in the sales pipeline, exactly where you want them. The agency had to make some iterative adjustments throughout the campaign, but it learned how to better prepare fully for future campaigns.

This campaign is still running, and the results have been tremendous! Read the entire case study here:

Email automation can save so much time and money, no matter what type of organization you are operating. If you’re ready to learn more, contact us and let’s set up a meeting. We’d love to share more about email automation, SharpSpring, and see how the two might benefit your organization.

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...

Q4 Marketing Strategy

Q4 is almost here, and with over a decade of retail sales and management under my belt, I have experienced how overwhelming, yet important, Q4 can be for a business. Q4 can make or break a retail operation for the entire year having 30-40% of business occurring in Q4, with 27% of total holiday business occurring digitally. There are so many factors to consider when entering October-January (depending on when your fiscal Q4 falls) such as busy personal holiday schedules, holidays specials and sales, holiday events, year-end budgeting and spending, as well as planning for the new fiscal year.

In order to swallow all of this and effectively execute the insanity of the holidays, retailers are planning up to a year or more in advance. I worked for various retailers for ten years and each one generally held a pre-holiday manager meeting in the summer, and then a holiday planning meeting in early October (retail Q4 generally falls Nov-Jan), trickling down information from corporate that they had been talking about since January. If you’ve lived through a holiday season before, hopefully, you have some best practices year to year that you can repeat, but if this is your first Q4, there’s no better time to start!

We have put together a Q4 Marketing Strategy that can work for any type of organization. “I’m not a retailer!” you say? No worries! Q4 and the holidays it encompasses affect every organization, and have great opportunity areas to grow your business.

B2B organizations

These types of organizations can benefit from people being willing to (or needing to) spend some year-end funds. Most organizations are also implementing a business strategy for the next year immediately following Q4 so this is a great time to close some deals you’ve been working on.

Non-Profits

The holidays are a great time to throw fundraiser parties and other events. People are also in the “giving spirit” around the holidays, so what better time to ask for donations? You can also do “give the gift of giving” campaigns around the holidays.

Calendar Planning

Now let’s talk calendar. We have a yearly calendar with all of the holidays that might affect our business or offer an opportunity for promotions. For example, as a B2B marketing agency, most of our clients are closed on government holidays so we take that into consideration when planning campaigns (and vacations!). We also look at major promotion holidays, such as Memorial Day, Labor Day, and the December holidays and usually promote discounts.

Calendar planning can vary from organization to organization depending on your field. At a marketing agency, ours is quite extensive as we have to consider holidays and events that might affect any and all types of clients. We include government holidays, state holidays, and other relevant marketing-worthy events, such as National Recovery Month, International Yoga Day, or International Pancake Day (these are all real things!). You can find a list of various calendar events on websites such as timeanddate.com, calendar-365.com,holidayinsights.com. We highly recommend creating your own calendar of events for campaign ideas. I bet you didn’t know that October 21st is National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day! This would be a perfect day for a bakery to run a campaign or launch a promotion!

What to Expect

Q4 is huge for us, as we are helping our clients with their next year marketing strategies, as well as picking up a lot of new clients that wish to start working with an agency and implement extensive marketing strategies.

We have compiled together all of our experience and ideas into a Q4 Marketing Strategy Worksheet that you can download here. It covers a multitude of factors to consider such as:

Business Goals – What are your revenue goals for Q4? Year-end? Do they line up?

Budget – Do you need to up your ad spend for holiday campaigns?

Content – Having content ready to go for Q4 will help you stay on top of your strategy as you’ll have so much going on.

Events – What holidays events are you attending? What events are you throwing?

Campaigns – What special holiday campaigns are you running? Will any of these continue into the new year?

A marketing strategy can be an extensive process if done right! This will hopefully get the ball rolling for you. If you’re newer to marketing and don’t know where to start, this worksheet will help you brainstorm some ideas and get you thinking.

Q4 Marketing Strategy Q4 is almost here, and with over a decade of retail sales and management under my belt, I have experienced how overwhelming, yet important, Q4 can be for a business. Q4 can make or break a retail operation for the entire year having 30-40%...

Measure Twice, Market Once “Measure twice, cut once.” my dad would say each and every time I would try to help him in his myriad of woodworking projects. Having assisted hundreds of businesses, large and small, with their marketing I'm constantly shocked to discover...

Everyone loves a turnaround story! People love to root for the underdog, love hearing about how failures turn into successes, love hearing about how people like Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team before becoming one of the most successful basketball players of all time.

We have a story like that too! In our experience, most entrepreneurs have some sort of story that involves failure, after failure, before success. One of our founders, Kirk Holmes, was asked to be featured in Journeys to Success: The Millennial Edition, in fall of 2016. The Journeys To Success series are compilations of real-life stories written by everyday people in all walks of life who have applied Napoleon Hill’s success principles found within the pages Think and Grow Rich, which put him on the map.

From Homeless to Patented Inventor

In his story, he tells how he went from a homeless addict to recovery, business successes and failures, to being granted a patent. He was rejected from the Navy for his ADHD diagnosis, he started a business, and then it fell apart. He was issued patent number 9,302,800 through his perseverance and extremely long dedicated work hours. His story is titled Darkest Before the Dawn, as life’s troubles and downhills always seem to lead back up, as long as he persevered.

Darkest Before the Dawn

Here’s an excerpt from this transparent, and moving story:

I was once a respected member of society. I was adored by my parents. We went camping for weeks every summer. We were “The Three Musketeers.” I was the light in my father’s eyes, and he was my hero. From 3rd grade on, my entire life was centered around following in my father’s footsteps and having a successful career as a Navy Aviator. With both of my parents being military officers, Mom a retired Navy Captain, and Dad a retired Navy Commander, I was raised with high moral and ethical values. Honor, courage, and commitment were my code. I had received scholarships from organizations and was viewed as a civic and community leader. Sadly, I drank my way out of college, started smoking meth, got involved with a very dangerous crowd and ultimately ended up homeless and living in a shed behind a church at the naive age of twenty-one. “How did I get here?” I asked. I finally saw that maybe it wasn’t my parental parole units or the cops, or everyone else…maybe I was the problem after all, and maybe I should give this thing a shot.

I hit the ground running from that moment forward. I now willingly participated in all of the rehab activities! I ended up choosing to spend a total of six months in Bakersfield and, because of the opportunity WestCare gave me, I haven’t had a drink or a drug since June 11th, 2003. Although I thought my life was over that day I arrived at rehab, I quickly came to realize that that was just the beginning. It is darkest before the dawn.

After a successful stint in rehab, Kirk moved on into the business world, experiencing many successes and failures along the way. In this next excerpt, Kirk talks about his transition period from yet another failed business opportunity, to what later became patent issue #9,302,800:

On my own again, wondering who I can trust, I wandered from gig to gig. The only saving grace I had was the support of family. The fight with my former colleagues continued, while I was still trying to move forward.

One of those gigs was a website for a friend of mine who owned a vape shop. I saw how they were manufacturing the liquids. At that time, they were doing so by hand on a table in a little room across the hall from the bathroom at the shop. Having been a huge fan and listener of the Tech Stuff podcast, I knew that they were using inkjet printer technology in the medical field to perform titration testing. So I knew it was currently possible to do the same. I approached my friend, the owner.

“Hey, Joe! So what if I could automate your entire manufacturing process and allow you to make everything one bottle at a time!?”

“That would be amazing! How?”

And so I began to tell him about the technologies currently in use in other industries and how we could combine them to do the same thing in the vape market. Needless to say, he was all in. I immediately rushed home and started tinkering with a microcontroller and Googling this and that. I began ordering the parts, and transistors, and resistors. I started relearning physics and engineering. My mom came out to visit, and I showed her what I had built.

She was blown away and instantly saw the potential and agreed to support me and my dream. Through my network of friends, I found a mechanical engineer who had worked on projects for NASA and an electrical engineer who worked with Qualcomm. They too saw the value in the project and joined to help fulfill my dream. After many months and many dollars, I had schematics for a sound prototype and I found myself sitting in the office of a very large patent firm in San Francisco…

What’s next?

This story covers Kirk up through approximately 2015, and now we’re building up this digital marketing agency…so the story isn’t over! The lesson here for entrepreneurs, business owners, or anyone who is struggling with anything is: don’t ever give up! Cliches are cliches for a reason, and the evidence is apparent in the case of Mr. Holmes.

You never know where you will land, so keep pushing forward and be open to opportunities that the universe presents to you. One of our core values at Venture Catalysts is “celebrate mistakes.” We don’t degrade our team for mistakes, we stay curious and ask a lot of questions. What went wrong? What did this mistake affect? What are the long and short term consequences? How do we prevent it from happening again? And most importantly, what did you learn from this?

Our greatest mistakes can lead to our greatest successes, as long as you learn from them and keep trudging forward!

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...

Measure Twice, Market Once

“Measure twice, cut once.” my dad would say each and every time I would try to help him in his myriad of woodworking projects. Having assisted hundreds of businesses, large and small, with their marketing I’m constantly shocked to discover how many businesses and marketing firms don’t follow the same sage advice my dad constantly gave me.

In Steven Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Covey gives us this advice in a different quote. “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

All marketing firms and executives see the value in digital and traditional marketing, however, few go about the process in an effective manner. Many will look to their competition for inspiration and insight and eagerly jump into the process of creating content (social media posts, blog posts, email campaigns, etc.) to drive new traffic to their business, only to discover that their traffic increased, and their revenues did not.

They marketed first and measured second. Rather than measuring first, and marketing second.

Many marketing firms that focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) start working with a new client by identifying keywords for the client and then begin writing article after article focused on those keywords. They look at metrics like search volume, competition, and the like to find terms and phrases where they can quickly rank. This is great if those are the phrases and terms that will drive not traffic, but conversions and therefore revenue. What’s worse is that even more marketing companies don’t take the time to set up the proper tracking to see if their efforts are really generating the desired results (purchases, contact us forms, etc). They market first, measure second.

There are other marketing firms that do a better job. These are the firms that set up the conversion tracking first and then actively begin to market and generate content and traffic to see what is driving revenue. This is a HUGE step in the right direction, however, if the firm is focused on organic traffic through inbound marketing and blogging they could be doing a larger disservice to the client by writing tens or hundreds of pieces of content that gets the client to rank high for the wrong terms. The result, a website that receives a lot of traffic and potentially a lot of emails and phone calls that lead to little to no sales.

The New Omnichannel Scientific Approach

In today’s society, people interact with brands in a variety of different methods and channels. For example, people receive emails, see tweets, see Facebook posts, ads, and go to websites of the brands and companies they love. Each of these channels, if monitored and used, gives the brand or company a plethora of new insights that can allow management to make better and smarter management and marketing decisions. This allows the company to determine that the ladder they climb, or the content they write, will be ‘leaning against the right wall.’

What Business Owners and Marketers Can Do

First and foremost every business already has a plethora of data available to them that can be used to make better decisions. For example, if you have an existing customer list why not create buyer personas based on that information. If you only have a few clients, take the time to interview them and listen for the similarities of what they are saying about the service you provide, what pushed them over the edge to choose your business rather than one of your competitors. Best yet analyze your data and perform an interview.

Spend the time to set up methods to track their success online and offline. The insights gathered from this data can save businesses hundreds and thousands of dollars.

Treat your conversion data as a metric with the same level of care as you treat your financial reports. After all the conversion data turns into hard cash at the end of the day.

Segment your customers based on profit. If you have 3 different products you may be surprised to discover that one of them is generating the most profit for the business, but another product may provide you a higher profit per unit. With this information, you can work backward to see what marketing channels allowed you to get those customers and focus on that, therefore, being able to generate more revenue for the business with less work.

Look at your advertising investment not only in terms of ROI (Return On Investment) or ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) but take into account the knowledge gained. For example, you may discover that your target demographic is completely different than you anticipated, your messaging is incorrect, etc. Knowing what isn’t working in many cases is more valuable than knowing what is working. As the old sales adage goes….”for every No you receive you are that much closer to receiving a YES”

Secret Sauce

In the book “Scaling Up”, Vern Harnish talks about the Wasted Debate-the debate of whether a certain idea applies only to a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) engagement. He goes on to say that in the end, we are all in the people to people business. He couldn’t be more correct. For so long marketers have focused on only using certain channels for marketing their business because their service offering is for businesses or only for consumers. Then they run off to focus on a particular channel. Nothing could be more wrong!

Every business should go through the process of advertising on every single possible medium they can. If you are an accounting firm that focuses only on publicly traded companies, you should be on LinkedIn and Facebook. Your advertising spend may not be the same, but decision makers at publicly traded companies, believe it or not, also have Facebook profiles. You may not have a Facebook campaign focused on converting them right away, but you may have a remarketing or retargeting campaign to target executives that have already been to your accounting firm’s website.

What we like to do is set up advertising accounts on as many mediums as possible (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, AdWords, DoubleClick, etc.), as many tracking codes and methods as possible (HotJar, Analytics, etc), and then analyze what is and is not working prior to changing anything. For example, many people do not realize that if you install a Facebook tracking pixel on your website you can begin to gather demographic information on the people that are going to your website, above and beyond the information you can obtain if your Google Analytics is set up properly. Many people also don’t realize that with HotJar you can see how people are interacting with your website…where they click, how they move their mouse etc. This information can be invaluable and help you ensure the ladder you’re climbing is leaning against the right wall and that you are marketing ONCE!

Q4 Marketing Strategy Q4 is almost here, and with over a decade of retail sales and management under my belt, I have experienced how overwhelming, yet important, Q4 can be for a business. Q4 can make or break a retail operation for the entire year having 30-40%...

Measure Twice, Market Once “Measure twice, cut once.” my dad would say each and every time I would try to help him in his myriad of woodworking projects. Having assisted hundreds of businesses, large and small, with their marketing I'm constantly shocked to discover...

If you’ve been researching marketing for your business, the term “persona” has likely come up. What exactly is a persona? It’s a generic, fictional customer that you develop that encompasses all of the qualities of your ideal customer pool. Why should you develop your personas? You can reach a more ideal audience, more quickly by knowing who you are trying to reach.

Is your organization growing? Are you looking into an investment in some further marketing to boost your growth? Maybe you already have a website and a few social media ads. Maybe you are starting from scratch! You’ve probably begun some research and you may have come to this query-to hire an internal marketing team…or outsource?

There are benefits to either option, no doubt, depending on the size and type of your organization. If you are a newer business, or a growing business, either way-one of the biggest factor when looking into a marketing strategy tends to be the budget.

Did you know that the national average salary for a Chief Marketing Officer is $189,521? That’s $15,793 per month-and that doesn’t even include the cost of a marketing team you would need to hire underneath the CMO. According to the U.S Small Business Association, organizations should spend about 10-12% of their annual revenue on marketing. So if your company did about $2 million per year, you could ideally afford this salary range for a CMO. The problem is, there are so many costs outside of this salary to account for, such as:

Additional team members (ideally 3-5 more team members for inbound marketing)

Inbound marketing software costs

Ad spend

…and the list goes on.

By hiring an outside agency, you will benefit in these ways-

No extended onboarding or training costs-we are already experts in our field

To hire an internal team, you will need at least 3-5 people for an effective inbound strategy. Each of these people would require at least 2 weeks of training to not only get immersed in your brand but to get familiar with all inbound software and strategies. This could include completion of Google certifications, lengthy training periods on multiple platforms for CRM, SEO, email marketing, and that list goes on. If you don’t already have one internal marketing expert, you may end up hiring outside help to do your internal training anyway! And you are already wasting money since this 2 week training period is non-productive work.

An external marketing agency will not require 2 weeks of training, as they are already experts in their field. They would only require an immersion training in your brand, which would ideally be included in their on boarding process. Most marketing firms will have some sort of initial intake survey along with a 1-2 hour brand immersion call, or initial meeting. This allows you and the firm to get on the same page for organizational culture and goals. You are already saving time with only a potential half day of immersion, rather than 9.5 working, non-productive training days, right from the start.

You won’t pay for any benefits

With an internal team of 3-5, you are going to be forking out a lot of cash on benefits, from health insurance to paid time off. With an outside firm, we take care of our own benefits. Think of what you could do with all of those savings on benefits! The average cost of benefits for one employee is 25-40% of their pay. So a CMO at a $189,000 salary would actually cost your company anywhere from $236,000 to $264,600!

With this additional savings, you could bump up morale by paying your existing team higher salaries, give everyone an extra vacation day, spend more on ads, beef up your website, the options are limitless.

No additional utility bills, as the firm will have their own office

While you may have room for additional offices, there are many other factors to consider when it comes to additional overhead costs. Each new team member will need a computer, a space to put that computer, either a desk or an office, and so forth. And while it’s a much broader range cost that will vary by industry and region, you can easily assume higher consumption of utilities and hard costs with each added employee.

More employees will use more electricity, water, and other utilities. They will also use more of the small things that are easy to leave out, such as toilet paper, styrofoam coffee cups, and other such hard costs. All of this will be saved on an external firm, minus the occasional meeting and shared cup of coffee.

Hire one, experienced team, rather than multiple internal employees

When you hire an internal marketing team, you will most likely hire people who show expertise in a specific area, such as web development, SEO, content writing, or ad management. With an external firm, you will likely find a team where each individual holds multiple areas of expertise. Since they’ve been working in the field for so long, they likely have collected multiple certifications and gathered experience in many areas.

It is highly likely that you find a team with a web developer, who also manages the email automation. Or a content writer that also manages SEO. So many of these fields are directly related to each other, that marketing experts know what expertise areas individuals should have-and know that it should be in more than one area. An external team with multiple areas of individual expertise will also benefit you in that you will have many eyes on your goals. Many hands make light work!

By hiring an internal team, you get the joy of purchasing all of these (and maybe different ones, maybe more or less, but you will need some for sure) and setting them up yourself. By hiring an external team, you don’t have to worry about any of that! External firms are paying for the software, so the cost is spread out among all the clients so you, again, pay less. You can usually receive better benefits too because firms usually have deals with software companies to be agency partners. Partners can usually offer discounted rates to their clients and/or better offers.

Some of these platforms hold their own development costs as well as monthly subscriptions. Imagine having to pay a couple of thousand dollars for each of these, just for setup, support, and training-not to mention your monthly subscription! An external firm would likely be able to waive any development costs for these platforms as they will be doing your onboarding and will build that into your monthly retainer.

Taxes-an outside firm is a business expense

Did you know you can expense certain parts of your marketing budget? Including salary and contractor costs? While you can expense marketing staff salaries, you still can’t expense benefits or other costs, but with an external firm, or contractor, you can potentially expense the entire cost.

Check with your accountant for specific details!

More money to spend on ads

At the end of the day, if a marketing strategy is done effectively, it should essentially pay for itself. The whole point of a marketing strategy is to increase your revenue(and better yet do so while simultaneously decreasing expenses), so if you’ve saved so much money by hiring an external firm, you might as well spend more money on ads.

The potential reach on Facebook alone, for $1 (the minimum ad spend) can be upwards of 4000 people. While this is likely the high end, with specific and other variables, it’s still important to understand. In fact, imagine if you even reached an additional 100 people with $1! Wouldn’t that be worth it?

Surely you can now see the benefits of outsourcing your digital marketing! So before you hire even that one employee for $3000 a month to update your website and your social media-think of hiring a digital marketing for that same amount and getting much, much more in expertise, software benefits, and other cost savings.

Do you have any more questions about how an outsourced digital marketing firm could benefit you? Fill out this form for a free consultation with our team.

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...

]]>http://venturecatalysts.us/marketing/why-you-should-outsource-your-digital-marketing/feed1Why I Left My Retail Career for A Life in Digital Marketinghttp://venturecatalysts.us/marketing/why-i-left-my-promising-retail-career-for-a-life-in-digital
http://venturecatalysts.us/marketing/why-i-left-my-promising-retail-career-for-a-life-in-digital#respondTue, 04 Apr 2017 17:32:45 +0000http://venturecatalysts.us/?p=115808

If you’ve watched the news lately, or scrolled through the latest on your choice news app, you’ve likely noticed that multiple retailers are filing for bankruptcy and/or closing up shop. This comes in a big wave at the start of 2017, with 9 major retailers filing for bankruptcy, which is how many filed in the total of 2016.

“The number of retailers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is headed toward its highest annual tally since the Great Recession.”

Nine retailers have filed in just the first three months of 2017, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC from AlixPartners consulting firm. That equals the number for all of 2016. It also puts the industry on pace for the highest number of such filings since 2009, when 18 retailers resorted to that action.

The rising number of retail bankruptcies comes as consumers are making more purchases online, and shifting their spending toward travel and other experiences.”

In September of 2016, I left my over a decade-long management career in retail, as these shifts and changes started to become really apparent to me. I began my career in 2004, working part-time at the mall during college. During this time, retail was booming, malls were full of stores, and there were plenty of jobs (and promotions!) to go around. I was a key holder (supervisor) by the age of 19 and ended my career as a Store Manager at the age of 31.

The retail world of management is a very promising career path, and usually, one that people don’t plan on. I certainly didn’t plan on ending up working in retail as I was majoring in theater, but it turned out the hours were flexible, the pay was pretty great (once you hit management anyway), and the benefits were outstanding. Retail management is not easy, and definitely not for the indifferent. Often times managers work 50+ hours to get tasks completed as they are the only salaried employees, and we often work unsupervised as our bosses are typically mobile, reachable by email and phone, and visiting in store only once or twice a month. So while it’s definitely not for the passive type, you earn what you work for.

For years, I had a plenty high salary, extremely flexible scheduling, and typically about 4 paid weeks off per year. I also had great health insurance, and many different benefits from sick days, to adoption assistance, to stock options, and tuition reimbursement available to me.

Along with the amazing benefits, a career in retail offered a kind of business management development and training that I never knew I’d get. The bosses I was blessed to work under held management training quarterly, upper management meetings weekly, workshops, etc. to continue our development and growth. This development and growth ultimately led to internal promotions, employee retention, and happy management. When I left my last company, there were many people in my immediate network who had been with the company over 10 years, myself being one of them.

I learned so much from my career in retail, about business and about myself, and I made connections and friends over the years that I know I will keep for life.

Now, as I’ve just spoken so highly of my retail career, you might be wondering why I left! I can’t stress enough my gratitude for everyone I ever worked with, and I would never speak ill of the companies I worked for. The truth is, I saw the topic of this article coming. I’d seen it coming since 2008 when everything started to turn downhill, very quickly, and then sort of bobbed up and down, back and forth, ever since the retail market never quite regaining traction. At least not like it used to be.

I heard many of my superiors talk of times of struggle, where the market had been on its ups and downs before, and in retail, sometimes you just have to enjoy the ride. While this had been valid, I sensed a more long term shift ahead.

I am an older millennial-I grew up with no internet, no cell phones, CDs were introduced in my childhood. I was the last generation to go play outside and come home for dinner when my dad whistled out the back door. Anybody in my age group will be able to relate to the massive technological revolution that has occurred in our lifetime. What I saw, instead of a rollercoaster, was a permanent shift in the way humans interact with shopping malls, as technology continued to shift and take over. The most successful (profitable) retailers are now online. ONLY. Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, etc. are taking the world by storm, and I don’t see it slowing down.

We have had more technological innovation in the past 20 years than the past 100, and the way the world is progressing this isn’t slowing down. While this means various shifts for various industries, what it means for retailers is online shopping. More and more retailers are seeing 30% + of their business from their websites, decreasing traffic in brick and mortar stores.

This gradual shift over the last 15 years or so meant a drastic change in how retailers manage a shop. When I first began my career, there were enough employees (namely money and payroll) to fully staff a store so that a customer could get a personalized shopping experience. By the time I left my retail career, the acceptable employee to customer ratio seemed to have doubled from a 1-10 to a 1-20, or more.

In a shifting world, retailers have to try to adjust as best as they can to a changing environment, and that meant saving money when they aren’t making money. This meant cutting back in a multitude of departments such as benefits, payroll, inventory levels, and the list goes on and on.

What retail employees experience as a result of this shift are longer and harder hours for salaried workers, as payroll costs are cut. Unhappy customers as inventory levels are decreased and fewer employees mean a less personalized approach to customer service. Benefits were lost, such as no raises one year, to no 401k company match the next.*

The weight of this shift made me really look at the big picture. No matter how great my leaders are, or a company is, or how financially sound they may or not be, no one can change the upcoming economic shift.

I made a decision in September 2016, that the previous holiday season was my last, that I would leave my long, and promising career in retail for different opportunities. I went through a tumultuous 6 months where I joined start up venture and left, applied for many jobs, didn’t get any, and struggled personally and financially. This was not an easy decision, and the results of that decision have been trying-yet rewarding.

I finally landed in a digital marketing firm with my “future fiance” as he calls me! You’ll understand why in a moment…

We realize the future is bright in the digital world. My partner has multiple Google certifications, and lots of experience online in various capacities, while I have my MBA and over a decade in business management to bring to the table. We knew a start up venture would be challenging (to say the least), but we know we are in a long-term promising field.

If you have a business, and you aren’t online-you are missing out! Every business in the world will need a website, digital advertising, social media presence, email automation, SEO…and the list goes on. We saw the opportunity with our joined skillset, experience, and knowledge, of business and the digital realms, to develop and grow into an extremely successful digital marketing firm.

The road has been a little bumpy, but constantly moving forward. We have worked many 60+ hours weeks, and there will be more. We have struggled financially (hence-future fiance!) and been extremely blessed. We have had personal doubts, and then big successes. Ultimately-we are entrepreneurs! It’s a startup life or us! While it may be trying at times, we believe in the digital world the growth that it certainly brings.

I am fully convinced that this shift will bring long term career happiness and security for me!

*These are general pieces of information, referring to various companies that I worked for over the years, as well as information from other friends working at other retailers. None of these particular things happened at any particular company that I worked for.

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...

The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 Rule-where 80% of the results come from 20% of the functionality. In business it can also be described as 80% of the revenue is generated from 20% of the products/services offered. When it comes to marketing the same holds true-80% of the revenue is generated from 20% of the organic keywords you rank for, content you produce, social media posts you generate etc.

The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 Rule-where 80% of the results come from 20% of the functionality. In business it can also be described as 80% of the revenue is generated from 20% of the products/services offered. When it comes to marketing the same holds true-80% of the revenue is generated from 20% of the organic keywords you rank for, content you produce, social media posts you generate etc.

If the majority of revenue comes from only 20% of the work, then why do so many marketing firms become mass producing content farms? They promise social media posts, blog articles, or email campaigns on a regular basis-but to what end? Shouldn’t marketing firms practice an agile marketing framework and present a marketing concept or idea, then develop an entire deployment strategy around that idea, to make sure the 20% of content that is deployed is the right content?

Ideally, this is done by re-purposing content in various forms-writing white papers and blog posts that are then shared on social media and deployed to the email database, and purchasing ads focused on that same content. Then set up all of the appropriate tracking methods to track the results of that concept or idea and report the results back to the client.

Even better, before testing and when possible, why not devote all this time to gather information from the existing client database? A better methodology which is not pay to play, but PAY TO LEARN. One tried and true method to LEARN is to talk with potential customers or best yet existing customers. This can be a time-consuming process, however, the results can be worth the time spent. When you allow customers and/or prospects to speak freely about the company’s product and/or service offerings through open ended questions, the resulting data can provide huge insights in order to create a viable marketing campaign.

The same can take place through deep analysis of the businesses current marketing efforts if the data exists. Unfortunately, with many organizations, data is not initially set up to be properly tracked. Vanity metrics like organic traffic abounds, but knowing which messaging (i.e. Buy Now vs Free Trial), medium (i.e. image vs text), or source (i.e. Facebook page, post, or ad) is working doesn’t.

So where does a company go from here? Well, one of the best things to do is to PAY TO LEARN. For example, run multiple different types of ads on Google and Facebook, testing multiple types of messaging and media. Focus on different product/service features or offerings and see which type converts the best and then build out an organic free approach to generate results that will provide revenue over the long term.

Spending this time up front and knowing which content your customers are looking at which actually leads to them purchasing, will make you more money and save you time in the long run. Imagine if you considered the Pareto rule and knew what your customers were really looking for?

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...

These days, anyone can easily become a writer by starting a blog! There are multiple free sites to help you start a blog, without needing any computer coding or web building skills. Say you decide to start a blog, you get it all set up, and you even write a few entries-now how do you make sure people are reading it??

These days, anyone can easily become a writer by starting a blog! There are multiple free sites to help you start a blog, without needing any computer coding or web building skills. Say you decide to start a blog, you get it all set up, and you even write a few entries-now how do you make sure people are reading it??

Writing a blog can actually involve a complex logarithm, just as doing SEO on a website. There are a few factors to consider, but once you know the basics, writing a blog that’s easy to find, and informative for your viewers is totally doable! Here are the top 5 things to consider:

Content

Keywords

Visual aids

Lists

White space

Links

First of all, find out what content your audience is searching for is key to writing a good blog that people want to read. What are other people writing on the topic? What are some frequently asked questions about your topic? Blogs should be informational; solving a problem. Blogs are meant to be snippets of knowledge from experts, or people with experience on the topic. If you are writing about knitting, think about what problems knitters would be looking to solve. Come up with a list of questions such as, what size needles should I use when knitting a blanket? What type of yarn is best for a sweater?

Keywords are important!! If you want to blog about “how to knit a scarf,” you will likely assume that readers will be searching for “how to knit a scarf.” There are probably hundreds of blogs out there about knitting scarves, so you want to ensure keywords are included in the title, as well as the body. It also helps SEO to have these keyword titles on any images in your post! Your keywords for such a blog might be “knit” scarf” and “how to”.

We all know that people like visual aids! Images, info graphics, charts and the like grab the readers eye and keep them engaged while breaking up content. An info graphic, such as the one you see below, is a great way to summarize your content. This ensures that your reader takes in the information you want them to see even if they don’t read the entire post.

The Ultimate Blog Checklist

Let’s talk about lists. If you’ll notice above, there is a numbered list of the items in this post. Lists draw the eye of the reader right away, sometimes being the first thing read even if it’s in the middle of a post. How many times have you veered off course to look at a bullet list? Think about it! Lists are also on Googles top factors when producing search results for their users, as they are easy to read and are visually appealing.

Another formatting tool is white space. Notice in this post that the paragraphs are not overly lengthy, leaving plenty of white space in between. This is also visually appealing and holds the attention of readers, giving them a break at the end of each paragraph. Could you imagine if this blog were one giant paragraph with no spacing between lines? You would have likely stopped reading by now!

Finally, links to other articles, blogs, etc. can help increase your organic traffic. There are different opinions out there on linking to other content, but simply put, the more you interact with other bloggers, businesses, users on the internet, the more potential you have to bring traffic to your blog. Linking to other articles also gives you some credibility that you’ve done some research. Most likely, you are not reinventing the wheel, merely rewording it, if you will, for your own audience.

This is just a list from experience and research; you will see that blogs come in many different forms! The best thing is to keep writing, writing, writing, and test and rewrite and keep going until you find your audience!

How Do I Market My Rebrand? So now that you've completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you've done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website...

We are rebranding! The team at Venture Catalysts is finally ready to publicly announce...that we will be re-branding in 2018! This has been quite a long process, truly beginning in March of this year and we’re not done yet! There are a lot of things on a...

Surely you remember a time when email was brand new and exciting. It really wasn't that long ago! As an older millennial, I remember when email was brand new for consumers and getting my first email address through AOL and hearing that exhilarating new phrase -...